We are not here to be redeemed, or prove ourselves righteous. We are here to become, to learn. That’s all there is—lessons.

The lessons arrive according to plan, what we agreed to face. They are strung out, pearls of cause and effect, across the days of a life. Some come from failed challenges in past lives. Some from the shape and wiring of the body we were given.

As lessons arrive, we are free to learn or resist. And there is no guarantee we have the strength or tools to learn a given lesson at a given time. It’s all good. They will arrive again—in this life or some other.

Everything outside seems dangerous. The rooms where we feel safe are defined by the familiar, the faces we know.

The people we don’t know could do anything, say anything. We protect ourselves by deciding they are evil.

But the mere thought that there is good and evil creates evil. Because it is the means by which we separate ourselves from the other. Reject the other. Dehumanize the other. Separation—the delusion that we are not all one—is what evil is made of.

There is no them. The room that seemed so small it contained just a single life holds everyone.

Loving the moment is embracing, with equal measure, the doubt and the certainty, the loss and the connection, the sin and the sacrifice, the fear and the courage. Loving the flaws protects us from being the flaws. Seeing the beautiful pain and opening to its perfection, keeps it from defining us. The more we love the ark, the more we live in the light.

The pettiness, the anger, the selfishness, the cruelty must be seen and loved. If these parts of the self are rejected and made “not me,” they grow to envelope, to become the self. The way to the divine always leads through what is wrong, what we are desperate not to be.

There is nothing at the end that wasn’t at the beginning. Each thought, each feeling that is banished becomes a monster that we feed. We nourish them with fear, disgust, shame, and—most of all—avoidance. The things we fear to think and feel grow large. Haunting and powerful. Until they become nearly everything there is.